ABSTRACT
Prologue This chapter focuses on the paradox of Ethiopia’s unprecedented longevity as one of the oldest polities in the world on the one hand and its pervasive and perennial culture of political violence on the other. To deal with the conundrum, operative Aristotelian and Weberian concepts on state formation and legitimacy are profiled. Likewise, theories of political culture and political development advanced by more recent social scientists, including Gabriel Almond, Sydney Verba and Lucien Pye, are highlighted as tools of analysis for the study. Ethiopia’s historical and geographical evolution in the context of domestic, regional and colonial violence in Northeast Africa is described. The case study of the culture of political violence and violence of political culture in Ethiopia is then examined within the historical span of 1769 to 2009. The theme that shapes and informs the analysis in this chapter is why, despite its historical longevity,1 Ethiopia has not been able to forge a peaceful, democratic or quasi-democratic political culture. To this very day political violence is the mode of attaining, sustaining and transferring ‘legitimacy’ and/or political power in Ethiopia, which establishes a thesis of the violence of political culture in Ethiopia and perhaps in other states where legitimacy is likewise routinely attained through violence. In his book, Africa and Africans As Seen by Classical Writers, Volume II, historian William Leo Hansberry2 stated:
It is a curious fact that centuries before the geographical and historical terms Babylon and Assyria, Persia, Carthage and Etruria . . . Greece and Rome had made their first appearance in the writings of classical authors; Ethiopia was already an old and familiar expression. Long after the names of Babylon, Assyria, Carthage and Etruria had become scarcely more than vague memories, preserved only in the morgue of history, the hoary designation Ethiopia continued in use as the appellation of a nation which the later writers of classical antiquity regarded as contemporary with their own native lands.
